Everything we thought we knew about female sexual desire is being overturned. Following from experiments, what we think turns us on and what actually excites us are two different things.

Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of four books of nonfiction: What Do Women Want?, The Other Side of Desire,In the Land of Magic Soldiers, and God of the Rodeo. In the Land of Magic Soldiers received an Overseas Press Club Award for international reporting and a Lettre-Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. God of the Rodeo was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In addition to the New York Times Magazine, Daniel’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Talk, and the New York Times Book Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. His writing is included in The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction.

14 June, 2016

Daniel Bergner: Let’s talk about a particularly provocative set of experiments that Meredith Chivers has done. This is fascinating Canadian research I’ve spent so much time with. So several years ago when I first got interested in her work and I kind of stumbled into her lab. I was working on a different unrelated project at the time. When I stumbled into her lab I found her showing an array of pornography – so men with women, women with women, men alone, women alone, and even bonobos having sex to self-identified straight women, gay women, straight men, gay men. And measuring both their physical response that is vaginal or response in terms of erection for men and then their subjective response via keypad. How turned on do I say I am. And finding something fascinating which was that the male response was pretty predictable. The straight men actually did mostly just get turned on to men with women or women with women. Gay men equally predictable. The women were very unpredictable and kind of anarchic in at least their physical response.

Again there was this big dichotomy. The women were saying I’m turned on by what I “should be turned on” by straight women, by, you know, men with women or to a certain degree I suppose men with men and gay women by images of women, et cetera. But their bodies were saying something completely different and their bodies were saying they were turned on by all of it. And perhaps most strikingly you might think those bonobos having sex would at least reach something animalistic in men. No the men showed zero response subjectively or physically. But the women did show this physical response to the image of bonobos having sex. So a lot of interesting things about this, probably too many to name but one for sure is that the idea of women’s sexuality as somehow more controlled needs to be put aside if we’re going to do any serious searching about Eros in women. And too this idea that women are somehow less visual, less immediate in their sexuality than men. Again you need to put that aside if we’re going to do any serious looking at truths about women’s sexuality.

Now here’s a bit of later Chivers research that both goes along with but also pulls us in a slightly different direction than that original set of studies. So remember part of the original set of studies shows women being quite anarchic in what they’re drawn to. Chivers decides okay, let me take a set of straight women, self-declared straight women and show them just four types of photographs and see what happens. Four types of pornographic photographs. So we’ve got a flaccid – and these are kind of disembodied genital shots just so we have nothing to distract us, not a pretty face, not a handsome face, et cetera. So we’ve got a dangling flaccid penis. We’ve got an erect penis. We’ve got a kind of coy soft porn female crotch shot, legs together. And then we’ve got a legs spread more hard core shot. So the straight women do respond to all of it physically. But that erect penis sends the plethysmograph, a measure of physical response, soaring. And it’s just an indication again of rawness, immediacy and just a kind of this is about sex. Let’s be careful before we complicate it with all the factors that we eventually complicate female sexuality with. There is a core to this and we shouldn’t be so quick to look away from it.

The idea that women are less sexually desiring than men is an idea that has been ingrained in society for a fairly long time. Women aren’t expected to be turned on as often as men are, and often it’s said that it is more difficult for women to be turned on in the first place. While men have been known to wear their sexualities on their sleeves, women have been taught and trained to be more coy. According to studies by Meredith Chiver, and here discussed by Daniel Bergner, the way society thinks of women is far from accurate.

Daniel Bergner has spoken before about the societal ideas of women’s sexualities. There are many ingrained ideas of what women do want or should want, such as a safe and monogamous relationship, that makes digging into the scientific research very appealing. In experiments, however, women proved quite different from their stereotypes.

Daniel Bergner's newest book is What Do Women Want?

While men were predictable in what got them going, women had no apparent rule set for what physically happened. They claimed to be turned on by what should do so, according to the general societal standards. According to their bodies, there was a much wider array, including a picture of two bonobos having sex, which did nothing for the men. This wide contrast between what was said and what their bodies showed caused some interest for a study, but to do anything accurately, and delve into the subject of female sexuality, the ideas of ‘should’ need to be thrown out.

Studying this idea has its own hardships- women in the studies by Meredith Chiver often play into these ideas, by telling the study they want what society might expect them to. Chiver decided to take a group of people, each identifying as straight man or woman, or gay man or woman, and show them an array of pornographic images. The men had no real hurdles for this study. Each were turned on by the expected images, and there wasn’t much deviation between physical response and what the men claimed.

The later studies done by Chiver back up this idea, that women are just as sexually interested as men, if not more. An image of just an erect penis can have an immediate response from an on looking straight woman, despite the societal idea that women take longer to get going. If anything is clear, it’s that the general opinion of women and sex isn’t often the truth.

Push Past Negative Self-Talk: Give Yourself the Proper Fuel to Attack the World, with David Goggins, Former NAVY SealIf you've ever spent 5 minutes trying to meditate, you know something most people don't realize: that our minds are filled, much of the time, with negative nonsense. Messaging from TV, from the news, from advertising, and from difficult daily interactions pulls us mentally in every direction, insisting that we focus on or worry about this or that. To start from a place of strength and stability, you need to quiet your mind and gain control. For former NAVY Seal David Goggins, this begins with recognizing all the negative self-messaging and committing to quieting the mind. It continues with replacing the negative thoughts with positive ones.

Dramatic and misleading

Over the course of no more than a decade, America has radically switched favorites when it comes to cable news networks. As this sequence of maps showing TMAs (Television Market Areas) suggests, CNN is out, Fox News is in.

The maps are certainly dramatic, but also a bit misleading. They nevertheless provide some insight into the state of journalism and the public's attitudes toward the press in the US.

Let's zoom in:

It's 2008, on the eve of the Obama Era. CNN (blue) dominates the cable news landscape across America. Fox News (red) is an upstart (°1996) with a few regional bastions in the South.

By 2010, Fox News has broken out of its southern heartland, colonizing markets in the Midwest and the Northwest — and even northern Maine and southern Alaska.

Two years later, Fox News has lost those two outliers, but has filled up in the middle: it now boasts two large, contiguous blocks in the southeast and northwest, almost touching.

In 2014, Fox News seems past its prime. The northwestern block has shrunk, the southeastern one has fragmented.

Energised by Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Fox News is back with a vengeance. Not only have Maine and Alaska gone from entirely blue to entirely red, so has most of the rest of the U.S. Fox News has plugged the Nebraska Gap: it's no longer possible to walk from coast to coast across CNN territory.

By 2018, the fortunes from a decade earlier have almost reversed. Fox News rules the roost. CNN clings on to the Pacific Coast, New Mexico, Minnesota and parts of the Northeast — plus a smattering of metropolitan areas in the South and Midwest.

"Frightening map"

This sequence of maps, showing America turning from blue to red, elicited strong reactions on the Reddit forum where it was published last week. For some, the takeover by Fox News illustrates the demise of all that's good and fair about news journalism. Among the comments?

"The end is near."

"The idiocracy grows."

"(It's) like a spreading disease."

"One of the more frightening maps I've seen."

For others, the maps are less about the rise of Fox News, and more about CNN's self-inflicted downward spiral:

"LOL that's what happens when you're fake news!"

"CNN went down the toilet on quality."

"A Minecraft YouTuber could beat CNN's numbers."

"CNN has become more like a high-school production of a news show."

Not a few find fault with both channels, even if not always to the same degree:

"That anybody considers either of those networks good news sources is troubling."

"Both leave you understanding less rather than more."

"This is what happens when you spout bullsh-- for two years straight. People find an alternative — even if it's just different bullsh--."

"CNN is sh-- but it's nowhere close to the outright bullsh-- and baseless propaganda Fox News spews."

"Old people learning to Google"

Image: Google Trends

CNN vs. Fox News search terms (200!-2018)

But what do the maps actually show? Created by SICResearch, they do show a huge evolution, but not of both cable news networks' audience size (i.e. Nielsen ratings). The dramatic shift is one in Google search trends. In other words, it shows how often people type in "CNN" or "Fox News" when surfing the web. And that does not necessarily reflect the relative popularity of both networks. As some commenters suggest:

"I can't remember the last time that I've searched for a news channel on Google. Is it really that difficult for people to type 'cnn.com'?"

"This is a map of how old people and rural areas have learned to use Google in the last decade."

"This is basically a map of people who don't understand how the internet works, and it's no surprise that it leans conservative."

A visual image as strong as this map sequence looks designed to elicit a vehement response — and its lack of context offers viewers little new information to challenge their preconceptions. Like the news itself, cartography pretends to be objective, but always has an agenda of its own, even if just by the selection of its topics.

The trick is not to despair of maps (or news) but to get a good sense of the parameters that are in play. And, as is often the case (with both maps and news), what's left out is at least as significant as what's actually shown.

One important point: while Fox News is the sole major purveyor of news and opinion with a conservative/right-wing slant, CNN has more competition in the center/left part of the spectrum, notably from MSNBC.

Another: the average age of cable news viewers — whether they watch CNN or Fox News — is in the mid-60s. As a result of a shift in generational habits, TV viewing is down across the board. Younger people are more comfortable with a "cafeteria" approach to their news menu, selecting alternative and online sources for their information.

Master Execution: How to Get from Point A to Point B in 7 Steps, with Rob Roy, Retired Navy SEALUsing the principles of SEAL training to forge better bosses, former Navy SEAL and founder of the Leadership Under Fire series Rob Roy, a self-described "Hammer", makes people's lives miserable in the hopes of teaching them how to be a tougher—and better—manager. "We offer something that you are not going to get from reading a book," says Roy. "Real leaders inspire, guide and give hope."Anybody can make a decision when everything is in their favor, but what happens in turbulent times? Roy teaches leaders, through intense experiences, that they can walk into any situation and come out ahead. In this lesson, he outlines seven SEAL-tested steps for executing any plan—even under extreme conditions or crisis situations.